In between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.
If you join a fight for social justice you may win or lose, but just by being part of the struggle, you win, and your life will be better for it.
The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interest, where any chosen emphasis supports some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial, or national or sexual.
I was a bombadier in WW 2. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not til I read Hersey’s Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do.
When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant.
They didn’t give their lives for their country! their lives were taken from them by their government.
There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color.
Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely the path that is your life. – Jon Kabat.
I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.
People who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back.
It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation, a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor.
When people don’t understand that the government doesn’t have their interests in mind, they’re more susceptible to go to war.
Group meditation according to Jon Kabat.
Why do we have to be a military superpower? Why can’t we be a humanitarian superpower?
If racism can’t be shown to be natural then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions.
Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist.
We must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time.
These people – the employed, the somewhat privileged – are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
In a two-party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn.
The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured.